Though the independent browser Firefox is quickly losing share to Google's Chrome, it still boasts hundreds of millions of usersmany of whom participated in Wednesday's Web blackout in opposition to the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

In stats released last night, Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, said it reached 40 million people during Wednesday's blackout, who in turn sent 360,000 emails to their members of Congress about SOPA and PIPA.

Mozilla has been taking action against the bills since Nov. 15, when it emblazoned its site logos with a black "Stop Censorship" banner. But during the protest, Mozilla blacked out the default start page in Firefox and redirected key Mozilla Web sites to an action page.

As a result, about 30 million people in the U.S. who use the default page in Firefox saw the blackout message, Mozilla said in a blog post. About 1.8 million people came directly to the mozilla.org/sopa site to learn more. The organization also sent messages to nearly 9 million people via Facebook, Twitter, and its Firefox newsletter and its messages were retweeted by more than 20,000 people.

Mozilla joined online protests from Internet bigwigs like Wikipedia, which blocked its English site all day, and Google, which replaced its main search page logo with a black bar directing users to an online petition that garnered at least 7 million signatures.

All that activity appears to have had the desired result. Senate and House leaders today announced that they would delay action on the controversial bills. A vote scheduled for next Tuesday in the Senate has been postponed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and in the House, SOPA sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith said the Judiciary Committee would also postpone action on his bill.

PIPA is designed to go after overseas, "rogue" Web sites that traffic in counterfeit or stolen goods, whether that's purses and prescription drugs or DVDs and MP3s. The bill would allow the Justice Department to obtain a court order and take down the offending sites and require that they be stripped from search engine results, among other things.

SOPA is similar in nature, except that Rep. Smith recently stripped DNS blocking from the measure. Sen. Leahy indicated that he too had concerns about that provision, but at this point, that section remains in PIPA.

Derailing these bills via the Internet has been seen as a victory over traditional lobbying techniques. In the new model, Internet heavyweights talk directly to the public, who then contact their representatives en masse, compared with the one-on-one contact by lobbyists.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine’s Solutions section, which covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered services and software for ExtremeTech.com.
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